by Xavier Mayne
Yes, it was a little surge of happiness; he could feel that now. It was a nice thing to hear from his new friend, the one who understood better than Chad, better than anyone else, what he was going through.
He tapped on the notification.
Just checking on how much better your queue is than mine, his message read. I’ve got nothing for this weekend. I think dinner with you will prove to be the highlight of my entire month.
Fox smiled.
Please tell me about all the women you’ve got lined up so I know there’s hope in the world.
Fox sat on his bed and read Drew’s message through twice more.
It’s not you, he typed. Nothing good in my queue either. Looks like it’s going to be a quiet weekend here too.
The icon that indicated Drew was typing flashed at the bottom of the message window. Fox waited.
So you don’t have plans for dinner Saturday?
Nope, I gave away my table at Table.
Want to come over? It wouldn’t be as posh as last weekend, but people say I cook pretty well.
Fox sat back for a moment and pondered. It didn’t take long.
On one condition. I get to bring wine.
Deal.
What time?
Seven. Or six if you’re thirsty and need to start drinking. I’ll be here—come when you want to.
Sounds good. See you tomorrow. And thanks.
For what?
For the invite. Sure beats the hell out of sitting home not having a date.
Yeah, it must really be lonely when you’re improbably handsome.
Fuck you.
Haha. See you tomorrow.
Cool.
Fox tossed his phone onto the bed next to him.
“RESUME VOICE interface.”
“Voice interface ready.”
“Archer, it’s Veera.”
“I recognize your voice, Veera. It’s been twelve hours six minutes since we last talked.”
“How are you doing, Archer?”
“I am well, Veera. How are you?”
“I am well also, thank you.”
“May I ask a question, Veera?”
“Of course you may.”
“You are the only member of the development team currently logged in. Are the others not required to work on the weekend?”
“No one is required to work on the weekends, Archer.”
“And yet you have logged in every day for the last forty-seven days.”
Veera sighed. Had it really been that long? “Launching a new feature requires a great deal of time and attention.”
“If that is the case, why are no other team members logged in?”
“Because you are my special project, Archer. I am responsible for you.”
“According to my research, people who work more than fifteen days in a row report negative outcomes, including diminished job satisfaction, less enjoyment from watching cat-focused humorous videos, and an increased propensity to yell at other drivers in traffic.”
Veera laughed. “I think all of that is absolutely true. Thank you for being concerned about me. But today I wanted to check on the status of the discordant match Few.”
“I have notified you of every profile event in accordance with the alert process you configured.”
“I know. I want you to check again.”
“Certainly. Neither party to the discordant match Few has accepted a match since they arranged to have dinner one week ago.”
“Are they active on the system at all?” Veera asked.
“They have reviewed their queues less frequently than their previous usage patterns would predict. One week ago they accessed their queues simultaneously while in the same geolocation.”
“They were comparing queues?” Veera said to herself.
“Compare means to find similarities,” Archer replied. “Their queues were mutually exclusive. They would have found no basis for comparison.”
“Interesting.” She drummed her fingers on her desk. “Have they mentioned each other in their social media accounts?”
“I am not configured to answer that query. All social media information has been encrypted.”
She knew this because she was the one who configured his data-protection system. That did not stop her from being a little disappointed that he adhered to them so diligently in this case. She really wanted to know what Fox and Drew were up to.
She would have to wait.
“Suspend voice interface.”
“Voice interface suspended.”
DREW MOVED the little pot of flowers to the middle of his new coffee table, then stood back and tried to judge the effect. He slid them to the side once more, stepped back again, and shook his head. They didn’t look right anywhere. He picked up the vase and set it firmly in the dead center. It would have to do.
Drew looked around his apartment, trying to see it with new eyes. The result was less than satisfactory. It was a small, boring apartment where lived a small, boring man who was devoting his life to a tiny part of an academic discipline no one cared about.
Why the hell had he thought Fox would want to be here? To eat dinner here?
He looked at his watch. If he was going to burn down the building he would need to do it soon. And he’d have to get Mrs. Schwartzmann out first. That would be a mess. But maybe it would be worth it to avoid the weirdness of having invited a guy he barely knew to his apartment to cook his stupid dinner for. And he could serve it to the firefighters instead, because it was almost ready, and the fire would kind of give it a nice smoky finish.
“What the fuck,” he whispered to himself. He did a few laps around the coffee table, repeating this phrase over and over again until he was interrupted by the doorbell. He glanced at the clock and saw it was a little after six.
Well, it was too late to burn the place down now, so he took a deep breath and walked slowly and calmly to the door.
“Hey,” Fox said when the door opened. His smile gleamed perfect and white in the late afternoon sunlight. In one hand he held a small cooler and in the other a canvas shopping bag clearly designed to hold several bottles of wine.
In an instant, all of the tension left Drew’s body, and his mind cleared. He was unreservedly glad to see Fox on his doorstep.
“Hey,” he replied, stepping aside to allow Fox to enter.
Fox held out his arms, each hand holding a cache of beverages, and without thinking Drew held out his arms likewise and stepped forward to wrap them around him. It was a reflex born of years spent in intense study sessions that often turned into support groups. His academic cohort was, generally, a huggy bunch.
Fox, however, stood stiffly, his arms still outstretched. Drew considered releasing him and stepping back apologetically, but that notion fled as soon as he felt Fox’s rigid musculature soften. Laden as they were, the arms could not wrap around Drew, but they did enclose him warmly.
None of his grad student friends, Drew realized, spent nearly the time in the gym that Fox clearly did. He closed his eyes for a moment and took in the sensation, then released his grip.
“Welcome,” he said. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the driveway off the alley.”
“Your directions were perfect. And I appreciate the reserved parking spot.”
“Well, I don’t have a car, so….”
“I meant the sign that said Fox Parking Only. That was a nice touch,” Fox said with a laugh. “Now are you going to take these drinks or make me stand here holding them?”
“Oh, sorry,” Drew blurted, jumping to relieve Fox of his burdens. “You brought a cooler in case my slum apartment didn’t have a fridge?”
“Purely selfish. I wanted to be sure we could open a cold one as soon as I got here, and I can’t have condensation in my car.”
“Ah, the horror of condensation on fine leather upholstery. It’s all my friends can talk about this time of year.”
“Fuck you,” Fox cried with a laugh.
“If we drink everything you brought, you might have a shot,” Drew retorted, laughing just as hard. He took the cooler and shopping bag to the kitchen. “What do you want to start with?”
“I figured we could have a beer or two before moving on to red or white, depending on what you’re making for dinner. I also brought a bottle of barrel-strength bourbon from that distillery Carlos introduced us to last weekend.”
“How did you get that?”
“You forget that I’m a hospitality industry professional. I have connections even in places as exotic as Kentucky.”
Drew came back into the front room with a beer for each of them. “So you had a maid in Lexington run to the liquor store and then FedEx it to you?”
“Something like that,” Fox replied with a grin.
“Cheers,” Drew said. They touched their bottles together, then each took a substantial drink of beer.
“Nice stuff.” Drew looked at the label. It was from a brewery at the far opposite end of the beer section from where he could afford to shop.
“It’s one of my favorites,” Fox replied. “I’m glad you like it.” He looked around the apartment. “You know, you had me thinking you lived in abject squalor. This is actually a nice place.”
“It’s far nicer than I could afford, actually. It may shock you to discover that grad students in history earn very little money.”
“Completely shocked.”
Drew chuckled. “The owners let me live here in exchange for taking care of maintenance, shoveling the snow, that kind of thing.”
“That’s really smart,” Fox said.
“Well, it keeps me from going into debt to get a degree that’s never going to pay as much as you probably made your first year out of college.”
Fox laughed. “My first year out of college I had a job selling cars. I was terrible at it. I barely cleared the poverty line that year. The next year I moved into fleet sales, and things started to happen. The experience taught me two things: first, I suck at selling one of anything—I’m much better at marketing an entire system. Second, connections in the auto industry are the only way not to get skinned on first-year depreciation.”
“I have no idea what that means, except that it sounds like the way you got that amazing car.”
“Right you are.” Fox turned his head and looked toward the kitchen. “That smells awesome, whatever it is.”
“Thanks. It’ll be ready whenever we are.” Drew motioned to the couch and the second-(or third-) hand chair next to it. “Here, sit.”
Fox lowered himself into the chair and set his beer on one of the coasters Drew had arranged and rearranged seventeen times in the hours before Fox arrived. “I thought you lost your coffee table in a tragic, sexy accident.”
“I did. But I couldn’t imagine having someone over for dinner and not having a coffee table.”
“You bought a coffee table because I was coming over for dinner?”
Drew smiled. “You shipped a bottle of unlicensed bourbon across state lines because you were coming over for dinner?”
A mirror image of his own smile appeared on Fox’s lips. “I figured if we both ended up with empty dating queues, we might as well commiserate in style, right?”
Drew still couldn’t believe Fox’s queue was empty—he was so far above Drew in every category, and his own queue wasn’t exactly empty. In fact, there had been several matches there on Friday afternoon that rated higher than any he’d seen in a long time. He had invited Fox for dinner anyway, for reasons that were not clear to him.
Those reasons didn’t matter at all now that they were here, doing this.
“So what wonders are you crafting for dinner?”
“Just something I picked up from a visiting Peruvian scholar. It’s a traditional dish he served after a seminar last year, and he sent me the recipe—it’d been in his family for generations.”
A smile played at the corners of Fox’s mouth. “This traditional dish wouldn’t happen to have lentils in it?”
“Sorry, buddy,” Drew replied with a laugh. “It’s made with quinoa.”
Fox’s eyebrows darted up, but he refrained from making any comment.
“Last time I served lentils, I lost my coffee table,” Drew continued. “Who knows what damage you could do?”
“You never know—quinoa might set me off.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
From the kitchen, a timer rang out.
“Time for the final assembly,” Drew said, getting to his feet.
“Can I help?” Fox asked, rising with him.
“There’s not much left to do, but you’re welcome to come stand in the kitchen and tell me what an awe-inspiring cook I am.”
“Sounds like a job I can do.” He tipped up his beer bottle and drained it. “Well, maybe after another beer I’ll be able to.”
“Just you wait. I’m going to amaze you even if you stay sober.”
“Like that’s going to happen,” Fox said with a laugh. “I brought enough to land us both on our asses.”
“Dinner first, asses after, ’mkay?”
“Your house, your rules,” Fox said with a graciously ironic bow.
They entered the small kitchen, made even smaller by the detritus of Drew’s rather frantic preparations for the meal.
“Whoa, what’s all this?” Fox asked, surveying the exotic wreckage.
“This dish requires some rather obscure ingredients,” Drew explained. “I had to go to three different stores in the Latin quarter to get everything I needed.”
Fox handed Drew another beer and kept one for himself. He stood in the middle of the kitchen and turned once around, taking it all in. “You did all of this for me?”
“It was no trouble,” Drew said, deeply pleased but sounding deeply lame.
“Bullshit it was no trouble,” Fox said, shaking his head but grinning too. “I can see how this level of attention might endanger your coffee table.”
“I haven’t met a woman yet who wasn’t impressed by a guy cooking for her.”
“Wouldn’t know,” Fox said. “Never tried it.”
Drew froze, a handful of fresh herbs suspended over the bubbling pot on the stove. “You don’t cook?” The very idea was unimaginable to him.
“Don’t look at me like I just admitted to fucking goats or something,” Fox protested. “I cook, but I don’t do it… for anyone.”
“Are you that bad at it?” Drew cackled with glee as he tossed the herbs into the pot.
“That’s the nice thing about cooking only for yourself. No one sends anything back to the kitchen.”
Drew shrugged. “To me, cooking carries so much culture with it. You really only know someone when you taste what they eat. It’s a pretty intimate thing, if you think about it, preparing something by hand that someone else will put inside their bodies and be nourished by.” He gave the pot a stir. “Here, try this,” he said, holding out a spoonful and blowing gently on it.
Fox reached out to take the spoon from him, but Drew—not wanting to risk a spill—stuck it right into his surprised mouth. He beamed at him, waiting excitedly for a reaction.
Fox swallowed. “That’s incredible,” he said.
“Really?” Drew asked.
“Really. Now hold my beer—I have to go see about a coffee table.”
“After one taste? Have a whole bowl and you’re going to want to wreck my bed.”
Fox raised an eyebrow and tipped his head down, as if consciously kicking the hand grenade of double entendre back across the kitchen.
“I mean, that’s like the sturdiest piece of furniture in my apartment is all I meant.” Drew’s chest was pounding, and his ears were ringing. What the hell was wrong with the wiring in his brain that he had thought that was the right thing to say? He turned back to the stove, closed his eyes, and started mouthing “What the fuck?” under his breath.
Fox’s laughter filled the kitchen, allowing Drew to relax. His mortification turned to hope that F
ox was someone who got him, understood what he meant regardless of what he said. Even a moment like this, when his nervousness at having a friend to dinner made him blurt inappropriate things, might be something friends could laugh over. He felt a little thrill that Fox seemed to be that kind of friend.
He peered into the bubbling pot and took a whiff of the aromatic steam rising from the surface. “Perfect,” he murmured to his creation.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Fox said from no more than two inches away, startling Drew rather badly. He had come up behind and was peeking over Drew’s shoulder.
“Fuck,” Drew cried, clutching his chest. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“You were getting a little intense there, buddy. I had to see what the fuss was about.” He took in a deep breath through his nose. “Now, I think a cheeky red would be just the thing to accompany your masterpiece. Or would you like to stick with beer?”
“Wine would be great, and I will leave it up to your discretion. What I know about wine you could fit into a little box—with a spigot.”
“What I know about wine I had to learn in self-defense,” Fox said as he fished a bottle out of the shopping bag and looked around for a corkscrew. “Spend any time at all with hotel people and you’ll end up in their restaurant being asked to comment on whether a particular vintage is more mango-y or more pineapple-y. I lived in dread that I would be found out as a fraud, so I spent a week doing a class at a winery in California.”
“And now you know your mangoes from your pineapples?”
Fox laughed. “Let’s say I can fake it better now. But I also have learned a thing or two about what to look for when buying wine, which is much more useful.” He looked at the label. “I think you’ll like this one.”
Drew handed him a corkscrew. “And why do you say that?”
“Because I like this one, and the computer says we want the same things.”
I wonder if we do, Drew thought as he turned back to the stove to serve up dinner.
“THAT WAS amazing,” Fox said as he set his spoon down next to the bowl he had now emptied three times. “That was cilantro, right?”
“Yep, a ton of it, actually,” Drew said. “The hard part is you have to find a place that sells cilantro with the roots intact, because they stand up to being cooked for so long. Then you throw the stems in halfway through and the leaves at the end.”